Poetry has never let me down. Without poetry, I would have found life less comprehensible, less bearable and infinitely less enjoyable.

Very odd, old age. Always knew it would happen, if I was lucky. I just didn't expect it so soon.

We learn from tragedy. Slowly.

My mother insured that a life of petty facts and dutiful farming was kept at bay by her passionate intensity, which nurtured the essential dreaminess of his nature

The passion that transforms life, and art, did not seem to be mine.

Time, for a man who has never truly felt a second of it, it not a great sacrifice

Memory is never pure. And recollection is always coloured by the life lived since